Mahalo 4.0: All about learning - <AUTHOR> http://thesethings.posterous.com/mahalo-40-all-about-learning <comment><USER2> I think they see the "content mill penalty" writing on the wall and are pivoting to spamming YouTube in advance.

<comment><USER3> The ads seem to be way down, maybe they are trying not to look like a content mill while there is a heap of Google attention on the issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are totally right about the ads being down. That's why it's so unfortunate/confusing that the how-to pages still feel cluttered. Visual clutter on sites like this are often just to make places for ads that "blend" in with content. But the new Mahalo has few ads.

As I wrote in my post: there are multiple sections of interesting information... presented in a disorienting manner.

I feel like the new learning mission is sincere, but am waiting for more tweaking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If Mahalo has been such a loved product with versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 why are they basically scrapping _all of it_ and releasing a new product?

It must be hilarious being an investor and seeing entrepreneurs pitch so confidently with ideas and then the next week see them something almost entirely different and totally confident in that.

Oh right if you _pivot_ it's okay.

<comment><USER5> You are a cynical one pclark!

keep in mind that Flickr, Groupon, Nintendo and Nokia are all pivots. Your first idea is rarely your best, and pivoting is what great entrepreneurs do while B-level entrepreneurs run their companies into the ground.

Now, factually you're a little off... so please let me get you up to speed:

1\. We've been doing articles and Q&A for 3 and 2 years--so that's not being scrapped. 2\. A year ago we stopped pursuing human-powered search since it wasn't growing 3\. We examined what was working and it was helping people learn--so we branded the company today "learn anything." This is a great big mission and it will make us a top 50 site in the next 2-3 years.

We currently have 105 team members and are adding 100--and we hit profitability in 2010. We are the 160th largest site in the United States not counting our YouTube traffic (1M+ views per day). If you added that together we would be top 100 today in fact.

In fact, I just left a meeting with one of our investors and they are thrilled with the fact that they invested in Mahalo and that we tried hard to make human-powered search work. They love the fact that we iterated on our idea. So much so they asked if we would take _MORE_ of their money.

You must be a young entrepreneur, because success in life is not about confidence--it's about humility and the ability to try things.

Good luck to you!

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the clarification I'll be sure to pivot my comment to reflect what the audience wants!

<comment><USER6> If anyone has ever paid you to be correct or insightful with your comments, then perhaps you _should_ consider it.

Thanks to Jason for dealing so well with such snark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think it's a really smart idea. How-to content is huge. Amateur videos of esoteric hobbies can get a quarter million page views in a couple months. I think the biggest risk they are running is trying to produce in super high volumes. I think this will lead to less compelling content. At first they can make it up in volume, but if they have success it will be relatively easy for domain experts to copy their approach and produce relatively fewer videos, tailored to the field, which will lead to higher CPMs.

The other big opportunity is using video as a gateway to ecommerce. QVC is the 2nd highest grossing tv station. There is definitely an opportunity to take this model to the web.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anybody here use Mahalo? What are some use-cases where it makes sense?

EDIT:

So I checked out the new Mahalo's advertised feature, "How to Convert Fractions":

<http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-convert-fractions/>

They have a video which is pretty good. (I wonder if creating hi-quality videos scales to satisfy investors?) Then they have the steps in the video in text format with words such as "Fraction" hyperlinked to a spammy Mahalo page:

<http://mahalo.com/fraction>

Below this content they have "Related" stuff like "How to convert fractions - XXX" where XXX = {Videos, Images, Newsfeed, Twitter}. These are {Google, Bing, Twitter, etc} auto-generated spam/noise and contain no useful information. (You can't auto-generate a sensible feed about converting fractions.)

Overall I'd rate the new mahalo.com as spammy. The videos + transcribed text may be good, but there's too much surrounding crap.

<comment><USER5> The spamming claim on HN is one done by a secret kabbel of SEO's who I've pissed off over the years.

These guys basically obsesses over everything I do and follow me around the social web. They vote my stuff down, flame me and generally try to bust my chops.

They are known as "jayters" because they hate on Jason. I love my jayters, because they make me appreciate how lucky I've been in this life. They have every reason to hate on me: I drive a tesla, I have not one but TWO bulldogs and I get more press they anyone deserves.

Hate on!!

<comment><USER8> Hi. I've never seen mahalo.com before nor have I commented on it. What I wrote down was my first impression as a user.

Also note that I pointed out the positive: "They have a video which is pretty good." But all the auto-generated stuff surrounding it is noise to me.

Best of luck with mahalo.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A fun side-story: There was a question on Quora recently - "Why did Duck Duck Go Block Mahalo.com?" and Jason Calacanis, of course, felt it necessary to weigh in. I had to read this response twice, assuming there was some intended irony:

 _"if they did that is a big mistake... we are not close to spam and a we have the best articles on many things like how to play guitar, speak french, etc."_

<http://www.quora.com/Why-did-DuckDuckGo-block-Mahalo-com>

</comment><comment><USER10> I know the HN community has mixed feelings (at best) about Mahalo, but definitely watch the video!

When I saw Mahalo in the title I almost skipped the article completely, but Jason provides a solid dissection of his company's evolution and the strategic mistakes they've made so far. (Plus it's pretty short.)

(Skip the Mahalo promo at the end.)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for actually listening. :-)

I would like to offer you a complimentary ticket to the LAUNCH Conference as a thank you. Feb. 23/24th in San Francisco. Ping me at email@example.com and i will arrange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was ready to say mahalo was the biggest spam website on the internet last week after the whole google search debate but now I think mahalo may have a killer product. right now it's like wikipedia 2.0 .... so far I like the 4.0 version ...maybe I'm wrong but I like this pivot

<comment><USER5> Thanks for a considered response.

May I offer you a complimentary ticket to the LAUNCH Conference as a thank you? Feb. 23/24th in San Francisco. Ping me at firstname.lastname@example.com and i will arrange.

it's going to be a killer event (see www.launch.is for details... 40 companies launching killer products over two days!).

<comment><USER12> Mahalo 4.0 is great! Please send my ticket to ... ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 4.0 as in four steps ahead of Google in the art of spam.

<comment><USER5> lame.

cynical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looking forward to Mahalo 5.0 and their next pivot.

<comment><USER5> cynical

<comment><USER15> Since you are focused mainly on video you could check Impossible Software , their demo in DLD 2011 was quite impressive . [http://www.dld- conference.com/articles/article/dld11-live_ai...](http://www.dld- conference.com/articles/article/dld11-live_aid_2186.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Instead of How To Pages they're going to concentrate on How To Videos. Not all that much of a pivot IMHO.

Pros:

\+ It should be more popular than user-generated content of the same type (overall).

\+ Very few other companies would be willing to invest as much time and money into competing. How To pages are much much cheaper.

\+ High CPMs if they can build a trusted brand with quality viewership.

\+ There's less competition for video content than text content, and it's harder to steal (no synonym substitutions, etc).

Cons:

\+ Hugely expensive. Low profit margins.

\+ Very slow to generate.

\+ Far less video views than page views (less ad impressions). Many on YouTube itself.

\+ Hard to manage and keep quality at large scale.

\+ Very small buyer market for high CPM video ads. Low click through.

</comment><comment><USER17> I guess this is in direct response to Matt Cutts openly pointing Mahalo on HN. We should make the Aaron Wall the real SEO police. Just read the seobook blog and you will see all the sneaky things sites like Mahalo and ehow does.

<comment><USER18> Could you please list a few things they do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The problem with all these pivots is that Jason never addresses the real problem looking for a solution:

The Problem: How do you couple an ad based funding model to user generated content without having that content model destroyed by ads displayed not in content of content and ads and ad frequency not fitting with user generated content.

Thee is the problem Jason and you still have not solved go back to the drawing board!

And to be fair I do not know if there is solution to the problem with a non- volunteer human infrastructure...maybe there is not one.

<comment><USER20> Make lessons 1-10 free (20-30mins each), charge for lessons 11 onwards. Most people that make it to lesson 11 would be willing to pay going forward, after seeing the quality of lessons 1-10.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for a great insight.

Would love to have your intelligence at the @LAUNCH conference. please ping me firstname.lastname@example.com and i will arrange.</comment></comment></comment>


A difficult experience with Autopilot in the mountains of Canada - <AUTHOR> https://driverlessratings.com/news/trouble-with-autopilot-in-canada <comment><USER2> Note, this was not some winding two-lane so typical of BC interior (Though this is getting better). This is a good road that was recently upgraded for the 2010 Olympics.

<comment><USER3> One again though, people are forgetting that "Autopilot" is just a marketing name for adavanced lane assist and adaptive cruise control (albeit of a relatively sophisticated variety). Expecting it to be able to cope with anything outside routine road conditions is a fools errand.

<comment><USER4> > people are forgetting that "Autopilot" is just a marketing name for > adavanced lane assist and adaptive cruise control

That, though, is due to intentionally deceitful branding.

<comment><USER5> Tesla autopilot is not that different from its namesake in airplanes. Autopilot does not fly the plane from JFK to LAX, it only maintains speed, altitude and heading. If anything unusual happens, autopilot disengages and drops controls back to the pilot.

So Tesla is not deceiving anyone.

<comment><USER4> > Tesla autopilot is not that different from its namesake in airplanes.

Which is not at all how popular culture shows it, and thus not what people assume when they hear "autopilot".

> Autopilot does not fly the plane from JFK to LAX, it only maintains speed, > altitude and heading.

There are autopilots which can do everything but taxiing and takeoff[0].

> So Tesla is not deceiving anyone.

Tesla is not deceiving actual pilots of airplanes large enough to have an autopilot old enough to only support stable flight maintenance. I'm sure that's great for all 10 of them.

Meanwhile, in the actual world there have been examples too numerous to count of people who pretty much expect the car to drive itself. Which I expect is exactly what the people who picked the term wanted: make it seem magic for the sales, but be technically correct enough that it covers your ass (and you can blame the driver) when it invariably fucks up.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lol. That is the famous "sea to sky" highway. You should have seen it before the 2010 olympic upgrades. It is a runway compared to what it once was. It isnt really a mountain highway but a coastal route. It follows a train track most of the way. You all know it. Something like half of north america's car commercials are filmed in vancouver, and many of those use the s2s.

I used to ride it several times a week on my vfr. The real rollercoaster starts north of whistler: the dirty dusty duffy lake road.

<comment><USER7> I love it in the dark at 2am with bears running across the road, love those single lane bridges also. Wonder how automation deals with single lane bridges.

<comment><USER6> On the duffy, but there are no one-lane bridges on the s2s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't wait for autopilot in mainstream vehicles but I'm not sure if I'd want to discover an "edge case" (pun intended) on a narrow mountain pass with no guardrails.

<comment><USER9> Nor do most people want to deal with "edge case" bugs in any software. Fortunately there has always been an endless supply of people who love trying out new cutting-edge technology who are willing to take this risk... even when it means driverless cars on potentially dangerous roads.

<comment><USER10> And all to often people get shanghaied into being guinea pigs by some "push to prod" dev...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How badly do you get motion sickness when using autopilot?

I find (like most people), that I don't get carsick when driving a car myself, but tend to get it as a passenger. With autopilot you're not really driving, but if you have your hands on the wheel, you sort of are driving.

<comment><USER12> ...motion sickness is not always what it seems, how do you not know that you have low level carbon monoxide poisoning from breathing in car fumes?

As a driver you may be that bit more alert with a road to concentrate on, as a passenger you might just be not able to fence off the symptoms - feeling sick, failing vision etc.

The reason I say this is that a Tesla has the best air-con, the auto-pilot and no emissions, so 'sickness' could be nothing to do with 'motion sickness'.

<comment><USER13> Unless your exhaust feeds directly into your car or are driving inside, it's unlikely that you can get low level carbon monoxide poisoning in a modern car.

<comment><USER4> It's not merely unlikely it's completely nonsensical. You don't get motion sickness in nose-to-tail traffic jams where gas poisoning could actually be an issue. Furthermore the average passenger car produces 20 times more CO2 (by weight) than CO (the ratio is even more skewed for diesel cars).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's interesting is there is a local company that sells a package where you pay a fee to drive super cars on this road. That includes a Model S and they get you to enable auto pilot to experience it.

My buddy tried it and said it worked just fine - on the winding road before you get to Squamish.

I guess my anecdote is just as invalid/valid as the author's.

</comment><comment><USER15> So it turns out that autopilot's capabilities are quite similar to drivers from Alberta :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Autopilot, like most software during development, is not ready for real use.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like a special remote video collab for YouTuber Bjørn in Norway to don racecar protective gear and try to break an X using Autopilot.

</comment><comment><USER18> In the Tesla's defence, I am from the prairie provinces and find the Vancouver -> Whistler road a little too much to handle....:)

</comment><comment><USER19> Who's "Nicholas Cronin", the guy behind this web site?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm Nick. Nice to connect. Just a guy interested in the transition from manual vehicles to autonomous ones.

<comment><USER20> The idea behind this site is great. Will you have a reference section to discover car models and their SAE autonomy level? Manufacturers make this hard to compare today with their marketing terms, and I see this becoming a key differentiator for tech-savvy buyers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! We will be breaking it down by OEM and model to add to the usefulness. I think we will leave the classifying of the SAE autonomy level to the OEM though. But by sharing real world experiences, buyers will have something else to make a decision on other than the marketing terms like you mentioned. Thanks again for taking a look!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: How happy will you be if MS takes over Yahoo and do you think MS will benefit? - <AUTHOR>

My take on this is MS will fail horribly in the long run if it doesn't consider wish of other 2 important stakeholders (i.e yahoo employees and end users/customers) --- i'm very uncomfortable to see almost all the time that m&a is all about increasing value of the shareholders and not about increasing value for other 2 stakeholders. How far you can go if employees and customer are unhappy with the merger? which i think would be the case in this tussle of yahoo-ms merger ... <comment><USER2> Well, I don't really use either of their products, so I don't have a strong feeling about the merger.

I think that the fall of Microsoft is eventual anyway, no company has historically maintained a strong dominance or monopoly in their industry over a long period of time. As things continue to change in the computing market, Microsofts sheer size works more against it than for it. We've all probably heard the story about how Microsoft almost missed the Internet in '95 or so. That one was easier to recover from than sinking billions of R&D dollars into a desktop app development when things suddenly go to apps in the cloud, or some similar thing.

At this point, I don't know that Microsoft can really benefit from any significant merger. They may however be able to fend off the inevitable for another few years with some strategic acquisitions though.

<comment><AUTHOR> i think u r right in the sense that i would rather acquire 10 different futuristic companies than just one jumbo that can fail terribly ... it would have been better if ms bought something like social networking, voip, cloud apps, virtual s/w for desktop etc. companies than just one single content provider.

<comment><USER3> what about the properties underneath the yahoo umbrella such as flickr, delicious, etc? what about the technology underneath the yahoo user interface javascript libs? don't forget that yahoo has diversified itself in media, for better or for worse, and the media diversity is something m$ft lacks.

<comment><USER4> I fear for my Flickr :-\

Seriously, though, I think Microsoft is also buying managers and developers who made better moves in many of the areas where it has fallen behind. YUI vs. "Atlas" (is it still called Atlas) for example. They get some good properties, but I think they are also looking for skills they apparently haven't had.

The question is, will they crush/warp/bend them or crush/warp/bend themselves?

<comment><USER5> "I fear for my Flickr :-\"

I recall hearing that from may people when Yahoo first bought Flickr.

Having to use a Yahoo ID to use Flickr was enough to get me to stop using it. Too damn annoying.

<comment><USER6> Are you a photography enthusiast, or were you just using flickr for personal photos? Where did you go after that?

<comment><USER5> Personal photos.

I've been giving Picassa a whirl.

There's a part of me that just dislikes the "winner takes all", eventual walled-garden effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I will not be happy at all because Yahoo might loose hackers like Doug Crockford and alike. The way he bashs Microsoft while he speaks is a clear indicator that he (or some others) might refuse to work with Microsoft. Moreover, if a company cannot market a product while spending whopping 6 Billion on research & having people like Ray Ozzie is doomed to hit a huge failure when it comes to Internet applications.

</comment><comment><USER8> MS will die a slow and painful death over the years if it doesn't change the way it does business and treatments towards its customers and other developers. MS also needs more innovation and invention rather than milking their ancient products. If MS takes over Yahoo and force its brand on Yahoo, it will take Yahoo down with it. Reinventing their image and mission as a company is probably a better and cheaper way than forcing to take over Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'll be delighted!

Combining Yahoo's high traffic with Microsoft's reasonably good ad management system would finally produce a competitor to Google Adwords (as outlined here a few days back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=154184> )

Microsoft hasn't been able to build Live.com traffic and Yahoo is clueless when it comes to building a useful ad management system. Putting the two together should resolve both problems reasonably quickly.

<comment><USER10> I doubt very much that it will go well. I used to work for a small Overture- like search marketing company. We were purchased by Yahoo about the same time Overture was. Overture's bosses took over that end of the business, to the extent that we were given @overture.com email addresses. Then they sucked away a large percentage of developer resources for years to do their total rewrite called Panama, adding features we'd had in Brasil (Brasil!) for years. Our code got drowned in the bathtub, except in the countries and languages that OVT couldn't bother to support.

So there's an example where better code and cheaper infrastructure, already in hand and ready to go, lost out to Overture.

So you think Microsoft will fare any better with that maligant tumor? MSFT's tech is nice, but it's not (repeat NOT) ready for anything other than US English + Europe.

It's a disaster in the making.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I think Microsoft will excise that 'malignant tumor' completely. Why would MSFT keep it? They want Yahoo's traffic (and all the bright, shiny bits everyone is worried will be destroyed), not Yahoo's failed business model implementation.

<comment><USER10> There's a good chance MSFT would want to excise it. I doubt their ability to do it, politically. OVT is entrenched. Too many high-up people (including Jerry!) would have to admit they were absolutely wrong and let an acquired company take control of the cashflow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think you are absolutely right about pleasing the stakeholders, especially because good engineers are hard to find and if the engineers leave en masse, there will be problems.

I see the culture of the two companies as incompatible. Yahoo! is a FreeBSD shop, they use lots of Free Software, MySQL, etc. Is Microsoft going to rip and replace all those servers? If they don't, they are saying FreeBSD and Free Software is better than Windows. I see this problem as being a very expensive issue.

Secondly, Microsoft has never borrowed money before to purchase a company. They were having Bear Stearns help them with this purchase, and while Bear Stearns is gone, they still will need some serious capital and will go into debt. This will change their culture, their ability to attract investors, and the bottom line.

<comment><AUTHOR> the cultural clash, the technology clash, the reputation clash will cost ms dearly ... also employees who dont leave will stay there with the lowest moral which is even more dangerous than an employee leaving the company ... this will also create internal politics about who's right regarding selecting a technology and/or new apps and business.

Anyway this would be fun to watch as 2 different giant animals (dinosaur and elephant) coming together to rule the jungle - while all the other animals like lions, tigers, leopards will try to create an even game to ouster these giants.

<comment><USER12> I do not think MS will attempt to merge teams and technologies; they are smarter than that, not at least for a mid term. I think they will basically run two companies and go for the main prize: ads base customers and search traffic. They will keep both engines separate for a while and consolidate the ads business in general into a giant force in revenue making; this will be the main problem for Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I will be very happy for two reasons: -First for the shareholders, it will be a wave of fresh air for their equity which has been plunging in value. -It will be a good for the search industry; it will diminish the myth around Google and its monopoly, create room for innovative solutions in search technology and for new companies to grow.

</comment><comment><USER13> Microsoft have been buying small innovative companies for some time without a significant effect it would seem. I'm not sure that buying Yahoo! would make a great deal of difference to them either as I feel that Yahoo! is too big currently to be part of the next-phase. I might be wrong though - it has been known once or twice before!!

</comment><comment><USER14> a small point: most yahoo employees/end users/customers are likely yahoo shareholders as well. so the creation of value for yahoo shareholders will benefit them as well. in any case, they can get a voice proportional to their share in the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, i didn't mentioned who are the shareholders? when m&a takes place its all about biggest shareholders who are mostly private equity or big venture funds and not the retail shareholders like you and me ... while customer and employees are located world over - for example a yahoo email user in a small village of china should also be considered as a value stakeholder because those type of users are in millions and in the same way an employee in the yahoo's r&d dept. in india is also as important as any other stakeholder.... so what would happen to ms if these 2 stakeholders switch their loyalty to the competitor (say google) after merger ???????

<comment><USER3> I think 'yahoo email users in china' might applaud the merger:

Yahoo Says It Gave China Internet Data: Journalist Jailed: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2005/09...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2005/09/10/AR2005091001222.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I use neither of their products but hope that Yahoo's shareholders will tell Microsoft to go urinate in a direction opposite the wind.</comment>


The Air Force Gives Up Its Plan to Retire the A-10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/news/a18985/a-10-warthog-retirement-plans-stalled/ <comment><USER2> The article linked to in this article is longer and more informative as to the A10 and its history.

[http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a18236/why- the-a-10...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a18236/why- the-a-10-warthog-is-such-a-badass-plane/)

The A10 is an interesting case of "the right tool for the job" versus "high tech"/big dollars. Note also that, per the above article, the deal that first secured the A10 also secured the existence of the F16.

</comment><comment><USER3> Retiring the A-10 probably has more to do with trying to find a reason for the F35 than any real issues with the A-10's performance, which is disturbing given the real concerns being raised about the F35's capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good. It's too cost effective to retire. Any replacement is bound to be wasteful and inefficient in comparison.</comment>


Dropbox in 1996 - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/19961226140230/http://www.dropbox.com/

<comment><USER2> They launched with the domain getdropbox.com and only after being succesful they were able to buy the real dropbox.com from the previous owner.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, two MIT > students tired of emailing files to themselves to work from more than one > computer.

<https://www.dropbox.com/about>

</comment><comment><USER4> it was getdropbox.com at its launch AFAIK.

</comment><comment><USER5> Always fascinating to go back in time. Have a look at Twilio [http://web.archive.org/web/20081216031744/http://www.twilio....](http://web.archive.org/web/20081216031744/http://www.twilio.com/)

What's interesting is the consistency of message to this day - simplicity, pay as you go, no Shenanigans Pricing, no contract.

<comment><USER6> While 2008 is technically "back in time" the OP is interesting because technologically 1996 was another era. 2008 was a few years ago. "To this day" indeed.

<comment><USER7> Another era but, more important, another service...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am i mistaken when saying that the website's design is pretty good for 1996?

<comment><USER6> Don't be a fool, I don't see a single <blink> tag. How can this be considered "good"???

<comment><USER9> No starry background, either. How are we supposed to know it's in Cyberspace?</comment></comment></comment>


Networking opportunity in New York - <AUTHOR>

Hi. I was wondering if there are networking opportunities with other hackers and entrepreneurs in New York city. <comment><USER2> <http://www.centernetworks.com/internet-week>

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes! We have plenty of events in NYC outside of "Internet Week" as well. Check also check out <http://alleyreporter.com> or <http://nyctechevents.com>.</comment>


Putting Wolfram Alpha To The Test: Not Super-Impressed (But Here Are 50 Invites) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/15/putting-wolfram-alpha-to-the-test-not-super-impressed-but-here-are-50-invites/ <comment><USER2> There are three things at work here: 1\. How stale the index/data is. 2\. The coverage of the data. 3\. The processing algorithms that do magic on the data to return results.

These are the key things every search engine deals with.

Google, Yahoo!, and MS Live compensate for stale data by scheduling their crawlers very cleverly. Google has published a few blog posts a while back about how it does it (I'm sure it's even more improved now).

The breakthrough of W|A is number (3) in my list above. They kick ass and frankly make search much more useful than anything we have now. You're no longer searching for pages that have the info, but getting answers directly. A Cambridge, UK, startup called True Knowledge does this too, and it's impressive (W|A is much better in data presenation though).

So for an alpha product, please do not judge it by have stale or incomplete data. It simply can't have all the data fresh from the get-go. Judge though by how good or bad are the algos that power the search. The data is relatively easy to get hold of when compared to writing awesome analysis code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases (for now), not searching for your own name or an online newspaper/blog.

It is purposely NOT Google.

<comment><USER4> > Wolfram|Alpha is focused on academic use-cases

I have, so far, found it nearly useless academically. (Computational biology, to be specific.) Perhaps it will improve with time.

<comment><USER5> Honest curiousity: What computational-biology question would you ask Wolfram|Alpha that you would expect a better answer to, vs. either Google, conventional journal search, or asking your own local computing resources? (In particular the questions that I know enough to ask, such as they are, would seem to be more suited to local resources.)

(In fact, I'd open that question up to any other similar discipline.)

<comment><USER4> Try getting any but the most widely used protein sequences out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am quite interested what is the business model for Wolfram Alpha. It seems that is rather focused on data analysis then searching.

It might be tough to rely solely on ads, but perhaps companies may be willing to pay to run their computational engine against their own data. It could be a great tool for exploring data.

The queries that we see right now could be hard to monetize. Lack of business cases and probably impractical to go mainstream.

Right now their are not any serious competition for Google. Refining the engine might help a bit, but I don't think their are going to replace ordinary search engine.

Any links or comments regarding the issue?

<comment><USER7> In the preview Wolfram gave a couple weeks ago at Harvard [1], he mentioned two sources of income:

1\. sponsors (in the sidebars)

2\. subscriptions (the main benefit being that you get to upload and run your own data)

[1] video: <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/2009/04/wolfram>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of course it's probably not going to return anything relevant when you enter your own name, why should it? It's certainly not Google. I get the feeling the author doesn't understand that.

<comment><USER9> I thought it was supposed to recognize it's a name and tell you interesting facts about the first name - popularity over time etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also, they have only provisioned for like 2000 requests a second [1], which seems pitiful for launch day when every one and their mother will hit the site.

[1] [http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers- poweri...](http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers-powering- computable-knowledge/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Can I refresh the page to see the distance between the Moon and New York change in real time, including accounting for the 1.3x10^-9 Earth-Moon recession speed? If so that's pretty cool!

</comment><comment><USER12> Are only 50 invites out because it gives computation time out error every now and then. Or does it imply anything else?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> seems like lack of current data is it's current achilles heel

<comment><USER3> I'm going to throw out there that Wolfram|Alpha might scrub it's sources' data more thoroughly. How can you trust unemployment data from a month ago? 2006 may have been some major study by INSERT_MAJOR_ORGANIZATION_HERE.

<comment><USER13> Okay...but surely some major organization has measured unemployment in New York more recently than 3 years ago.</comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla situation worsens as three board members call it quits - <AUTHOR> http://www.techienews.co.uk/978597/mozilla-situation-worsens-three-board-members-call-quits/

<comment><USER2> I hope this develops sanely. There has been a lot of emphasis on the conflict over the personal beliefs of the CEO, but I think this article was correct to point out that some of the resignations were over desire to appoint a more product-specific CEO.

What's weird about this is that as an individual he's still entitled to his own personal beliefs. If this person can still function and keep his own bias out of matters (and expresses a willingness to do this!) -- then there's no reason to put too fine a point on it.

This might be akin to holding different religious beliefs - and while that idea can be scary when you think X may think Y for ulterior motives A, B, and C; the day to day expectation is that their role is limited to being reasonable and calculated when challenged or asked to justify their actions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think its great to see that the people that work at Mozilla feel strongly about ethics and what they consider to be right and are passionate about their product.

<comment><USER4> The response from Mozillans (?) does make me feel better about the whole situation

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This particular website appears to have buckled under the traffic. In the mean time, here's a mostly equivalent article:

[http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/28/mozillas-bad-week- employee...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/28/mozillas-bad-week-employees- call-for-ceo-eich-to-step-down-3-board-members-leave/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Mencius Moldbug traces back the lineage modern progressivism to the Puritans, and you can still see the effects of this lineage in its illiberal totalitarian righteousness[1]. They were briefly the supporters of liberal principles like free speech and open debate when the movement was young and had no power. Like all movements which have grown to power, it now seeks to drive all dissent into the shadows by making dissenters bear a heavy price, a scarlet letter, if you will.

[1] [http://foseti.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/review-of- unqualified...](http://foseti.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/review-of-unqualified- reservations-part-1/)

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't call using the power of free speech to oppose the hateful views of a CEO to be totalitarian righteousness. Would you feel invigorated to work for a CEO who supports slavery?</comment></comment>


FCC Authorizes SpaceX to Provide Broadband Satellite Services - <AUTHOR> https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-authorizes-spacex-provide-broadband-satellite-services <comment><USER2> Here's one way I could see this killing Comcast, even in major cities:

As a homeowner, you by a small box which lives under the eave of your roof. The box has high-bandwidth, low-latency satellite uplink to SpaceX which gives you your internet.

The same box _also_ has a terrestrial wireless repeater which serves the local neighborhood. Internet is available through your "tower" to neighbors and passers-by. You and SpaceX split the revenue from the traffic.

Basically, it's like a solar roof, but for internet. Photons/bits rain down from space onto your roof, and you sell the energy/bandwidth back to the local area for a price that amortizes your investment.

In areas very poorly served by internet, or with very poor broadband choices, there could be an especially strong financial incentive to be the guy on your block with a SpaceX repeater.

It would certainly scale a lot better than every house having an uplink-- customer connections are instead concentrated into micro-regional nodes. If there's a node in your area, you buy internet from them. If there's no node around, you invest in becoming one.

This could drastically decentralize and cheapen internet across the globe, if done right. It could be _extremely_ disruptive to telecoms, and profitable for SpaceX.

<comment><USER3> this model already exists (google "WISP micro pop"). One of the primary problems with doing this at a large scale is that the bandwidth via satellite will not be that great, compared to what's possible with current terrestrial technology. the second is that the micro POP needs some kind of serious battery backup and a way to meet five nines or better reliability. you can't start hanging downstream customers off of the rooftop radio system on some random person's house unless you can be absolutely certain that the main uplink won't be unplugged by somebody's kid messing around with a power-over- ethernet injector underneath a desk.

one of the challenges with a wisp micro POP approach for current last mile FCC part 15 unlicensed band operators is that you need to (a) keep the equipment powered independently of whatever the POP-host customer might be messing around with inside of their house, and (b) provide a good sized UPS for it, and (c) ensure that the POP stays in place and contractually "survives" the original resident moving out, either new tenants or new homeowner. The (c) part requires a fairly long and ironclad commercial lease agreement that becomes attached to the property title, which is not something either ISPs or homeowners take lightly.

<comment><USER4> Why 5-9s? I doubt any home connection has this, let alone the satellite.

<comment><USER3> An ISP serving from 5 to 30 downstream customers needs the micro pop to be up and online at least five nines, if not, something has gone terribly wrong.

<comment><USER4> doubt

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is monumental - I claim every major advance in communication technology immediately precedes a major progress for society.

This will make the 'Internet' truly global and ubiquitous.

So excited for the developing world.

<comment><USER6> I'm from a third world country(Sri Lanka) and we already have really cheap LTE access, the connection I'm using right now(on my phone) gives me something like 1GB/1.5USD at average 4MBPS. What sucks is the speed and reliability, speed always fluctuate and even though most of the island is now covered by 3G, LTE is not a given. It has been improving a lot though because we have relatively good competition between mobile ISPs(something like 10 providers all island) and more than a quarter of the population has smartphones and demanding bandwidth.

<comment><USER7> I'm from a third world country(Germany) and we don't have cheap LTE access. I pay more than 40€/month (about 50 USD) for 4GB of LTE and I got my contract for half of what it would normally cost. The reception is very poor and I barely ever see the LTE popping up on my phone, most times it's just 3G. And that's in the ex-capitol of Germany. If I visit my parents, which live barely a 45 minute drive outside of the city, I got no phone reception at all (not even emergency calls). My provider (Vodafone) claims to have the best coverage of Germany. Wired internet is very spotty, too. There are still a lot of parts within the cities, where you barely get a downstream of 1 Mbit/s. So yes, when I say that Germany is a "third world country", I mean it (at least regarding the internet coverage). I'm a web developer (my wife is an admin) and when we searched for a new home, we've had to turn down a lot of offers, because the houses/flats didn't have a proper internet connection. Now we're getting our internet though cable but because the cables are to old, we can't get TV over cable at the same time.

Sorry, needed to get that out. I'm a little frustrated here, because I have been in several poor countries (Africa, Thailand, Moldowa) and they've all had a way better internet coverage than Germany.

<comment><USER8> >I'm from a third world country(Germany)

I was under the impression that "third world" was supposed to be defined as "a country that was not on the axis or allied side during all of World War 2." Your use of the term directly contradicts this definition.

<comment><USER9> I was under the impression that it was irony. ;)

Also it was the Cold War, not WWII. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World)

>The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Communist Bloc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a hiker who likes to spend many nights camping out in the remote wilderness, this will be a blessing but also a curse. I'll be able to stay connected to family and friends, and have emergency services and information available if necessary, but at the same time I'll have Hacker News and Reddit distractions - but inevitably this is the way the future will be, so it's time to get used to it.

At least when going on a cruise I won't have to pay for their shitty expensive satellite Internet.

<comment><USER11> This is where I would love my old Samsung's "ultra power saving" mode. Nothing but calls and texting on a black and white screen. Almost a week of battery life.

<comment><USER12> What phone is that?

<comment><USER13> My S7 had it, and so does my S8. Very cool feature that I haven't seen in other phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Please tell me that this means Comcast will go out of business. Oh man. The excitement I would feel at watching them go down...

<comment><USER3> Satellite can be amazing tech. But it's still not going to be the best viable option for high bandwidth connections in medium to large sized cities. As companies like centurylink build GPON and 10GPON based FTTH networks (example: Capitol, Hill, Seattle) it's quite possible to do 900 x 900 Mbps symmetric, though slightly oversubscribed, residential connections.

DOCSIS3.1 over old copper coax cable, with enough RF channel bonding, can also do 300 to 900 Mbps downstream, again slightly oversubscribed. With much less upstream because the RF channels are usually allocated asymmetrically at a ratio of 10:1 or thereabouts.

This is by no means going to hurt Comcast. Comcast (and similar companies like Wave, RCN, Charter, Shaw, etc) are building DOCSIS3.1 and also overbuilding their own networks with fiber. They have the established right of way through major cities, both on pole and underground, and can incrementally build a FTTN/FTTdP architecture with existing copper, and will eventually overbuild everything with singlemode fiber to the customer.

What this _will be revolutionary for_ is small towns, remote/rural areas. In the US as an example the market for ISP last mile connections that is presently served by either WISPs, or in places where no WISP exists, two-way Ku/Ka-band VSAT terminals (HughesNet, ViaSat, etc). The capacity constrains on traditional geostationary consumer grade VSAT services result in terrible things (TDMA oversubscription that pushes latency to 1150ms during peak hours), and things like 20GB/month transfer quotas. That's for a typical $100/month, 24 or 36-month term with the latest generation of Viasat's services.

For polar regions this will be a big deal because they are presently almost entirely dependent on geostationary C and Ku-band satellite capacity.

On ships: Very relevant and has the potential to capture a ton of market from Inmarsat's I-4 and I-5 series satellites and tech, and Iridium's upcoming maritime products. With a sufficient number (thousands!) of polar orbit satellites it can cover mid ocean areas very effectively.

<comment><USER15> > The capacity constrains on traditional geostationary consumer grade VSAT > services result in terrible things (TDMA oversubscription that pushes > latency to 1150ms during peak hours), and things like 20GB/month transfer > quotas. That's for a typical $100/month, 24 or 36-month term with the latest > generation of Viasat's services.

I live in a rural town. This is most definitely the status quo, and your description might actually be rosier than what happens in reality. It's quite a stark difference compared to the +100Mbps fiber connection that you can get about 60 minutes away in the city.

<comment><USER3> yes... From a US consumer perspective, although I work in two way satellite but not in consumer-facing stuff, I've experienced it in places in Idaho where a whole town's population is 150 people.

There are some "middle of the night" lows in traffic use where a few of the consumer VSAT operators offer quota-free traffic. Can be used with bittorrent clients that support time-based scheduling and automatic pausing such as to download a few episodes of your favorite TV show between 0100 and 0445 every morning.

But during peak evening hours, for human-interactive use like web browsing, it's generally going to be a miserable experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reading the full document[1] is really interesting. Lots of details about the potential technical problems, timelines and a couple requests to deny the application.

[1] [https://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/201...](https://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2018/db0329/FCC-18-38A1.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Oneweb and Telesat intend to build LEO polar orbit satellite networks that are, architecturally, very similar. Their objections are mostly about interference and spectrum use. If all three projects come to fruition and actually build thousands of satellites and launch them, we could be looking at not just spacex's 4,000+ satellite in polar LEO, but several thousand more from oneweb and telesat as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Background section from one of the attachments to that announcement:

On November 15, 2016, SpaceX filed an application requesting authority for its proposed NGSO FSS satellite system, comprising 4,425 satellites in 83 orbital planes, at an approximate altitude of 1,110 to 1,325 kilometers. In this application, SpaceX proposes to operate in the 10.7-12.7 GHz, 13.85-14.5 GHz, 17.8-18.6 GHz, 18.8-19.3 GHz, 27.5-29.1 GHz, and 29.5-30 GHz bands. SpaceX also requests waivers of certain Commission rules.

<comment><USER18> Out of curiosity, dont they have to ask other bodies like European Union or other countries for permission as well? Those satellites wont fly over usa only, which is fcc oversight.

Also reversing my question - if they would get denied, could they form company in EU and still shoot satellites from there based on EU permission?

Just curiosity of a hacker in me pushes out these questions ;)

<comment><USER3> It is not entirely impossible to have satellites where the legal owner is incorporated somewhere for regulatory purposes. There are a few geostationary, traditional style C/Ku-band transponder capacity satellites which are owned by companies in the Isle of Man. Huge numbers of satellites are owned by a Luxembourg based company (SES), one of the top-4 largest satellite operators worldwide, not because they particularly love Luxembourg so much, but because it has regulatory and tax advantages. The majority of SES' earth stations and facilities are not located in Luxembourg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What will the latency be like? My understanding is that these satellites will be in lower orbit, allowing for shorter round-trips... But how much shorter exactly? And how would that translate to real-world latency? Presumably there would be multiple hops involved in traversing the SpaceX network?

<comment><USER17> Geosynchronous orbit is 35k kilometers up, which a calculator tells me is 119 light milliseconds from the surface.

Iridium satellites were the first set of satellites I could find numbers for that made any kind of relevant example. They orbited at 781 kilometers, or 2.6 light milliseconds away. Over 45 times closer.

<comment><USER3> okay... so i work in two way satellite and will expand a bit on what this looks like in real world practice, with currently available technology and satellite architectures.

geostationary orbit dedicated (1:1) transponder capacity, in real world use with large earth stations and SCPC modems, has latency of around 485ms to 490ms for a return trip ping. That's a figure from remote earth station (example: Nauru) to the other end of a link (example: Singapore).

119 x 4 = 476 ms

add anywhere from 10ms to 20ms for a combination of modem Tx encoding, framing, adding FEC, and then the reverse on the Rx side.

example:

nauru router with a 1000BaseLX link into a satellite modem generates one ICMP ping

nauru --> satellite -->

satellite --> singapore

singapore modem does decode, passes IP traffic to a router or something else that can answer ICMP

singapore --> satellite

satellite --> nauru

nauru satellite modem decodes, passes traffic to router

<comment><USER17> I was very careful not to draw any conclusion besides "closer" because this is not my wheelhouse.

Some of the low cost wireless broadband projects have proposed the use of a ground station fairly nearby as the upstream network provider but I haven't the fuzziest what SpaceX has planned.

In your opinion what fraction of the overall delays in the network are attributable to the diameter of the orbit (great circle distance and ground- to-satellite distance) instead of the limitations of the hardware?

<comment><USER3> delays in geostationary orbit based systems are limited by basically two things... one is the distance, assuming dedicated 1:1 capacity. From a consumer internet user perspective the other delays are oversubscription and TDMA timeslice related. Consumer grade VSAT-based internet services (hughnesnet, viasat, etc) that you can buy for a cabin in a far rural part of Idaho are oversubscribed at a 16:1, 32:1 or greater ratio. So the RTT latency will be anywhere from 495ms in the middle of the night up to 1250ms during peak evening hours. This is a network architecture limitation/capacity limitation at layers 2 and 3, not so much about the physical distance that the RF has to travel.

The SpaceX system will likely operate somewhat similarly to o3b, which has a number of backbone link earth stations around the earth, adjacent to major fiber IX points. They don't want to endlessly pass data satellite-to- satellite-to-satellite because that will reduce the overall throughput and capacity of the system. Within a single moving spot beam I bet they are designing the system to pass data satellite-to-satellite if necessary. Or as few hops as possible. Once again using a rural Idaho example, at any given time a satellite or an adjacent pair of satellites in two orbital planes might "see" both a rural cabin CPE, and also a larger earth station/trunk link located next to terrestrial fiber in Boise. The goal is to get the traffic from the CPE to Boise in a few hops as possible. Ideally in a single "bent pipe" relay architecture.

<comment><USER17> I'm still not sure if you answered my question but thank you for participating. We don't often get people with real experience in satcom.

I've never had to understand satellite physics beyond explaining to a director why he needed terrestrial internet to solve his telecommunications problem. They get the Grace Hopper explanation (aka the speed of light says data can only move this far per nanosecond)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What the implications are for countries that severely restrict and monitor internet access? Would Chinese citizens be able to sign up for this service? Would SpaceX comply with foreign governments asking to ban connections or new customers from their countries?

<comment> the-pigeon It would be subject to local wireless spectrum control.

So like for your example it would have to sell to Chinese customers illegally if it wasn't going to comply with their censorship regulations. Which the Chinese government could then do a lot to fight.

So basically no, satellite internet is unlikely to have any impact on censorship.

<comment><USER21> Here's a wild idea... They could disable transmit in these areas, but allow reception. Someone in a hostile area with access to an antenna could send one way messages up with useful info.

<comment><USER22> Good idea, but just as easy to detect (send a message).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The last fifteen years I have been lamenting the fact that we happen to be living in that tiny slice of history between the internet being invented and the internet being everywhere, having to deal with things like "long distance" and "no service" and underhanded last mile monopolies.

I could not be more excited about this.

<comment><USER24> Conversely, I am happy to have existed during the tiny slice of history between the internet being invented and governments and corporations figuring out how useful it is and controlling it for their own purposes.

<comment><USER25> And that period, alas, was all too brief.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also discussed when the application was filed [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12973223)

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if you'll be able to get a device small enough for this to replace satellite telephony. I enjoy backpacking and would like to get a sat-phone for emergencies, but it's kind of cost prohibitive.

</comment><comment><USER27> Could a SpaceX constellation provide lower latency than undersea fiber? If the satellites can communicate to each other would the speed of signalling through a vacuum/air (~30% greater than fiber) outweigh any other steps?

If so, maybe SpaceX should get into HFT/arbitrage between global markets?

</comment><comment><USER28> Do they have to get a license from every country in which they intend to operate?

<comment><USER29> No, you need to get authorisation to launch a payload based on where your company is headquartered.

<comment><USER30> I'm assuming the parent was asking if licenses are required to provide service to people in other countries.

<comment><USER29> The linked site is for the FCC giving them permission to launch and operate the service. They may need individual licenses to operate in each country but I answered in the context of the submitted post. This article

[https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/03/california-startup- accuse...](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2018/03/california-startup-accused-of- launching-unauthorised-satellites-into-orbit-report/)

Also provides more context, this company launched from outside the US but as a US company they needed authorization from the FCC for the payload and operating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Would probably fix the now somewhat "limited by cost constraints" inflight WiFi for airlines. Lots of capital to switch over though. And perhaps more complicated tracking/pointing. Smaller, less wind resistance, and so less fuel burn cost though.

<comment><USER32> And long-term contracts. I remember hearing GoGo signed on for an exclusive 10 year contract with airlines who use them, with no plans to upgrade bandwidth during that time.

<comment><USER31> The Gogo deals require consumer pricing that is revenue positive too. The airlines that chose their own unbranded satellite can subsidize prices if they want. And, of course, Gogo doesn't work over the ocean or other large water bodies, unpopulated areas, etc.

Though the gogo antennas are simple and way less capital expenditure, faa certification time, and aircraft downtime for installation.

<comment><USER33> Gogo works over water on their new(ish) 2ku band installations. Two years ago I flew to Hawaii on one of the first Delta flights outfitted and got some pretty good speeds (and oddly enough it was free because of "limited connectivity").

Also pro-tip, if you have T-mobile you can use Gogo for free. There's a small upgrade fee to make it work the entire duration of the flight. It's intended to be mobile only but I'm sure some people here can figure a way around that ;)

<comment><USER31> Well, yes, but Ku band means all the benefits of the simple antenna are gone.

Do they try to enforce "mobile only" solely with a MAC prefix database?

<comment><USER33> >Do they try to enforce "mobile only" solely with a MAC prefix database?

Nope, way simpler than that. Just a simple user agent check. Although recently they've made some changes that make it harder, but just loading up the iphone simulator gets around it.

Now watch someone from Gogo see this and fix the loophole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm sure that radio astronomers will be thrilled. 4425 additional jamming transmitters.

</comment><comment><USER35> Has SpaceX indicated that this network is meant to cover every home and business directly or connect to a hub to distribute locally?

In terms of democratization, space to the home with commodity hardware is such a game changer it's not even funny. My napkin math says that latencies across the Earth (like NYC to Melbourne) would beat existing fiber.

<comment><USER3> Both, I think. I would be surprised if there is not a higher-bandwidth, larger, more expensive high gain rooftop CPE which can be used by a small ISP/WISP in a remote area. They would use that for their uplink to the internet and then distribute access locally via point to multipoint 5 GHz radio systems, GPON fiber, whatever is feasible.

<comment><USER36> Also, remote LTE towers could provide cellular connectivity anywhere.

<comment><USER3> yes, fixed wireless LTE (baicells, other competing LTE based products for WISPs), or traditionalmobile wireless... Whatever local methods are possible to distribute service from an islanded ISP's local 'core' routers. As an example an ISP in a town in Nunavut that was previously dependent on C-band geostationary satellite capacity.

When I say 'islanded' ISP I mean an ISP that has no access to terrestrial point to point microwave, or fiber, to reach any sort of upstreams or major IX points. Either physically islanded (such as an ISP on the island of Nauru) or somewhere in a terestrial location, but logically islanded because it would cost at minimum several million dollars to build PTP microwave or fiber to the nearest medium sized city. One example might be any of the communities on Hudson Bay which are fly-in access only.

In previous discussions of the spaceX system, I have mentioned o3b as an example of a new, clean sheet of paper design satellite network that people should familiarize themselves with. The ordinary internet user will rarely if ever see an o3b terminal, since it is at minimum about $45,000 in hardware costs and is a pair of 1.8 meter motorized, multiple axis tracking antennas, modems, BUC + SSPA, etc. o3b is intended for high capacity trunk links to replace a setup like a 6.3 meter Ku-band antenna and dedicated geostationary transponder KHz.

Satellite architecture wise one of the interesting things of the spaceX plan is that the satellites will be in polar orbits (orbital inclinations anywhere from 82 to 105 degrees, not sure exactly). Whereas o3b orbits its satellites at low inclinations around the equator, meaning that their effective coverage area reaches from +/\- 45 degrees latitude only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm curious to what layer SpaceX will allow application developers access to. If there is to be any hope of having cryptographically secure communications using this network, it will be essential that the whole stack is open source. Putting blind faith in SpaceX seems foolish.

<comment><USER3> satellite (earth station) systems engineer here: I highly doubt that there will be access at anything other than layer 3. The CPE will have a 1000BaseT port on it, when you connect to it, it'll hand out a DHCP v4 and v6 IP address on it. Maybe if you pay an extra $15 per month you can get a single static v4 address. I am very doubtful that it will be possible for an individual end user with a rooftop terminal to get access to "the network" at what would correspond to layer 2 in the OSI model.

It is possible that a more expensive service tier offering might provide L2 ethernet fabric virtual wire adjacency. Similar to the general idea of an VPLS / EoMPLS virtual wire tunnel, where whatever you plug into one end will see the single MAC address (or set of MAC addresses) of your other equipment on the other end. But this will be a managed service and not something that you can build arbitrarily.

<comment><USER12> Thank you. You're the only "hacker" here among evangelicals and dreamers. Thanks for your informative comments on "hacker" news.

<comment><USER3> Without evangelicals and dreamers major new ISP infrastructure wouldn't get built. But it has to run into practical realities of what a network will look at all the way down the OSI model stack. People want gigabit FTTH to every home in the USA but the construction costs could be $5,000 per house on average.

<comment><USER38> I followed this closely and thank you for pointing out the cost implications per house connection. While that's a significant amount in the USA,it's far monstrous in the developing countries/rural areas;which from this forum are touted as the major targets of the SpaceX system. Do you see a way of reducing this cost that can practically serve a rural town in, for example, Africa? (I'm from East Africa and trying to make sense of what this new development means for local ISPs)

<comment><USER3> If you have a town/city of population 2,500 to 20,000 that has very poor internet connectivity in general at present, this will probably be most useful in its larger version to bring one relatively high capacity DIA/IP link (like 150 Mbps downstream x 50 Mbps upstream) to a single central location, as an ISP POP in the town, and then local distribution throughout a US county-sized area by point-to-point and point-to-multipoint terrestrial microwave in the 2.4, 3.5, 3.65, 5.2 and 5.8 GHz bands. Possibly with some use of low-cost equipment in the traditional licensed (6, 11, 18, 23) GHz bands, unlicensed 24 GHz band PTP, 60 and 80 GHz, etc.

<comment><USER38> Much appreciation for this feedback. I definitely need to dig further, but your comments are painting quite a discernable image of what the system means from an end user POV. We still got almost 5 years to its realization but something worth keeping tabs on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Satellite internet service should provide major operational cash flow for SpaceX. That too on recurring basis.

Rocket launches generate revenue once per launch and for the foreseeable future, there will only a limited number launches per year.

Very good move by SpaceX.

<comment><USER40> Can you please explain why recurring revenue is significantly better for a rocket company?

My understanding is Falcon 9 launches are limited by manufacturing and launch pad limitations and not market demand. Launching satellites take away from both of those, so he clearly thinks the direct to consumer business is worth it.

<comment><USER39> Recurring revenue - launch the satellite constellation once and generate monthly subscription revenue potentially running into billions of dollars a month.

Manufacturing limitations & launch pad availability, once they are resolved (along with launcher reuse) will lead to a point where there is not enough demand to fill the launch roster. This internal demand will help them fill it up.

<comment><USER40> I always hoped ISS resupply and mars transport would work as reoccurring revenue.

This is probably a great use if he has extra rockets and launch pad time, but it seems a bit of a side project compared to manned space travel.

<comment><USER41> This venture goes hand in hand with the goal of manned space travel and going to the Moon/Mars, explorers are going to need an internet uplink on either and this allows it to be separate from just large spacecraft providing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> We have ourselves an international trade war concerning satelite spectrum. FCC rejects the idea of "first-come-first-served" and supports mechanism that allow equal spectrum sharing among applicants in the same licensing round. But it can only do so overhead USA. SpaceX competitors, like OneWeb, contend that SpaceX should be forced to subject to ITU Coordination, that currently assigns use of the spectrum based on ITU filling date priority.

This argument will certainly be applied in other countries with less concerned regulators, so we will have a complex patchwork of rules from one country to the next and the satellites will have to switch bands repeatedly in a single orbit. The ability to block a competitor from operating in certain territories has massive commercial and geopolitical implications:

</comment><comment>===

ITU Coordination. In its Petition to Deny, Telesat observes that international coordination will be required between the SpaceX system and its own NGSO FSS system. Telesat argues that, at minimum, any grant to SpaceX should be conditioned upon compliance with this international obligation. In response, SpaceX argues in support of the Commission's avoidance of in-line interference regime, which, it asserts, yields more efficient spectrum sharing results than a regime based solely upon ITU priority. We recently declined to adopt Telesat's proposal to tie coordination obligations and licensing conditions directly to ITU filing dates by awarding priority according to those dates, and accordingly deny Telesat's petition in so far as it reiterates Telesat's ITU filing date priority proposal. We include a condition requiring SpaceX, like all other NGSO FSS operators, to comply with the spectrum sharing requirements specified in section 25.261 of the Commission's rules with respect to any other NGSO system licensed or granted U.S. market access pursuant to the processing rounds in which SpaceX participated. We recently adopted changes to section 25.261 that replaced the avoidance of in-line interference methodology for triggering spectrum division (absent coordination) with a default spectrum splitting sharing mechanism that is triggered when the change in system noise temperature caused by interference, or ΔT/T, exceeds a threshold of 6 percent. However, we note that outside the United States (i.e., when communications to or from the U.S. territory are not involved) the coexistence between SpaceX's operations and operations of a system that received a grant for access to the U.S. market are governed only by the ITU Radio Regulations as well as the regulations of the country where the earth station is located and are not subject to section 25.261.

</comment><comment><USER43> This is going to be great for industrial M2M service. A whole lot of industrial plants (food or other) are out in the middle of nowhere even in the US. Places were you just can't get cell service.

</comment><comment><USER44> Did anyone else find Jessica Rosenworcel's statement at the end of the memorandum to be unprofessional?

I don't often read FCC rulings but her language seems breathless, unfactual, and unprofessional.

 _coming together to pioneer a wide range of cool satellite services_

Cool?

 _No one imagined commercial tourism taking hold, no one believed crowd-funded satellites were possible, and no one could have conceived of the sheer popularity of space entrepreneurship_

No one?

Lastly, her statement is rambling. Especially the last two paragraphs.

</comment><comment><USER45> Will it work inside cars without a special antenna?

<comment><USER31> From one of their early FAQ docs:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/7zqm2c/starlink_f...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/7zqm2c/starlink_faq/)

 _" What kind of antenna does it use? It will use a flat Phased Array antenna about the size of a pizza box or laptop computer and expected to cost between $100 and $300. You will need line of sight to the open sky, mounted on your roof or anywhere outside. The antenna handles both upload and download and is capable of gigabit speeds."_

<comment><USER45> So this is for stationary internet only, not for mobile.

<comment><USER46> No reason it couldn't be made to work on vehicles.

<comment><USER31> Yes, but a bit beyond what's needed for Xmradio/Sirius. A laptop sized antenna isn't an easy 3rd party install.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I wonder how the total bandwidth of the system will compare to BGAN which is pretty darn costly compared to LTE. Terminals would also have to be more reasonable to expand past the media/energy customers that BGAN tilts towards.

<comment><USER48> BGAN is very limited - you only get a few hundred kbps... This will likely be more like O3B, which can do gigabit (if you pay for it, and of course the total bandwidth is limited and shared so speeds would drop significantly if they had high take-up).

So this will definitely be far higher than BGAN, but from what I'm reading here people have far too high expectations if they're in a populated area... Definitely this could be an absolute game-changer for rural areas, but for densely populated cities you're going to have a better time with fixed line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This sounds like a HUGE win! Anybody know what time frame we can expect for being able to sign up for such a service and what they will be offering? I hate At&T and comcast with a passion.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am looking forward to seeing the test lab results for the rooftop CPE.

</comment><comment><USER22> Will break first world broadband monopolies, force prices down, and perhaps destroy the terrestrial industry - from a profit POV.

Balloon net in conjunction, to act as towers?

<comment><USER50> By creating a new super monopoly called Tesla? One entity in control of the entire internet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> What is the big advancement here compared to say Hughes Satellite Internet that is slower then DSL?

<comment><USER52> Lower latency and much higher data rates.

<comment><USER53> You're comparing current satellite technology to something that is scheduled to come out in about 3 to 4 years. That's not very fair considering that there are many other geosynchronous high-bandwidth satellites scheduled to come out before SpaceX is ready.

<comment><USER40> LOE will always provide faster latency than Geosynchronous orbit.

I suspect that total bandwidth will go to the person with the most satellites, and LEO has much cheaper launches than GeoSync.

Geosynchronous orbit is more than 15 times farther away. That is why the communication will be quicker, and why the launches are cheaper.

<comment><USER53> I specifically said high bandwidth since the latency is obviously better with leo. I don't know what you are implying by much cheaper launches. They need many, many more launches to hit the same capacity/coverage as a geo satellite. One launch may be cheaper, but SpaceX will need dozens.

<comment><USER54> You're correct about coverage -- 3 GEO sats can cover most of the planet -- but not about capacity, which kinda scales with satellite mass, and benefits from being closer (less power needed per bit.)

<comment><USER53> That is not correct. You have satellites of roughly the same mass over the last decade that are adding more and more capacity. You also do not benefit from being closer.

<comment><USER54> Why yes, I'd noticed high throughput satellites. And being closer means you can use less electricity on the satellite for the same signal-to-noise ratio, so yes, it is a benefit that comes from physics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> What is China going to do when their citizens have access to the Internet via these Satellites?

<comment><USER56> The same thing they do today with VPNs: outlaw it, put reasonable restrictions in place, accept that some amount will slip through (or heavily police it and hand out lots of jail time, depending on local situation, political climate etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Great News!

</comment><comment><USER58> Cancelling Comcast now...</comment>


Ask HN: agreement between YC and its start-ups? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious. Is it a 100 page document? What are the most important aspect of the agreement? <comment><USER2> The first question I can't answer, but the second question is easy: talk to a lawyer. Only _your_ lawyer can tell you what parts of the agreement are important to you.</comment>


Bad Diets Are Responsible for More Deaths Than Smoking, Global Study Finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/04/03/709507504/bad-diets-are-responsible-for-more-deaths-than-smoking-global-study-finds <comment><AUTHOR> > What would happen if everyone around the globe began to eat a healthy diet, > filling three-fourths of their plates with fruits, vegetables and whole > grains? We'd run out. Yep, that's right. A recent study published in the > journal PLOS One by researchers at the University of Guelph found that there > would not be enough fruit and vegetables to go around.

<comment><USER2> Maybe it would be a good idea to prioritize those crops then instead of corn for HFCS, which we seem to have more than enough of

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Our diets are influenced by what was fed to us when we're infants. Studies show that infant formulas that contain corn syrup and sugar can cause childhood obesity, which explains why nearly 1 in 5 children in the US is obese.</comment>


Deadly 'ghost gear' haunts seas and coastlines - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-50510666 <comment><AUTHOR> Link below is to the very striking photo in the article of a stag with a fishing net tangled in its antlers. Looks like he's wearing a Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes hat (Order No. ... anyone?) and one huge orange pearl earring. A horror.

[https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/375/cpsprodpb/129C5/production...](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/375/cpsprodpb/129C5/production/_101692267_stagone.jpg)</comment>


CEO of Open Technology Fund Resigns After Closed-Source Lobbying Effort - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/935k5p/open-technology-fund-ceo-resigns <comment><USER2> I can't reconcile this article with the cnn story about the "Wednesday night massacre" by the trump admin. [https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/17/media/us-agency- for-global-me...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/17/media/us-agency-for-global- media-michael-pack/index.html)

It says she was fired by trump via new usagm, with four other heads to be replaced by one of the admin insider cronies who is a religious conservative.

<comment><USER3> She resigned and then, rather than allow her to leave on her own terms in two weeks, USAGM fired her that evening.</comment></comment>